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Mac dudes - do you defrag your HD? Speed tips?

spelunkspelunk 3,400 Posts
edited April 2009 in Strut Central
So my aging, beloved 1.5Ghz Powerbook G4 is showing some real signs of age after three years of use and abuse (never thought it'd last me this long doing so well though!). I've got about 10 gigs left on my 100 GB internal drive, and since I'm abroad without install disks or an external HD, don't really have the option of just doing a fresh system install.I read some places about HFS+ "automatically defragging" the disk...is it worth it for performance purposes to defrag? Any other tips or random system processes I can shut off to make things a bit faster? Gotta get another 4 months outta this thing until upgrading to the new rev. macbook.Thanks in advance...I have mp3 raer for anyone with good advice.

  Comments

  • BrianBrian 7,618 Posts
    don't defrag. definitely free up more than 10% hd space though
  • spelunkspelunk 3,400 Posts
    What should I be aiming for, 30%?
  • BrianBrian 7,618 Posts
    as much as you can?
    i think 15-20% is what you're supposed to aim for and anything below that you start seeing performance decreases. what os and apps are you running?
  • dollar_bindollar_bin I heartily endorse this product and/or event 2,326 Posts
    as much as you can?
    i think 15-20% is what you're supposed to aim for and anything below that you start seeing performance decreases. what os and apps are you running?

    yeah, I'd say 20% is where you start seeing a hit in performance, keep your free space at that level or higher. Also, since you have a laptop which is probably not on 24/7, you might want to run the maintenance scripts manually, this can make a huge difference in the performance on a computer that's not on all night, every night.

    http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/maintscripts.html

    I've never seen any legit mac performance checklist that recommends defragging the drive for general maintenance. It might be a last ditch effort for a really full disk used for high performance applications, but it's probably not needed in your case.
  • spelunkspelunk 3,400 Posts
    DOLLAR BIN!!! Coming through in the clutch! That just solved all my problems, I think the scripts were disabled or something cause I hit enter in the terminal and everything was suddenly perfect again.

    Here's some 45 rips for ya that I gave to a fellow board member awhile back. I owe you one, thanks!

    DivShare File - 45 Rips for HighC.zip
  • dollar_bindollar_bin I heartily endorse this product and/or event 2,326 Posts
    Downloading now, glad I could be of help.
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